Mitsubishi PLC Drivers

Improvements in Connectivity to Mitsubishi Melsec-Q and Melsec-FX

IGSS has supported communication with Mitsubishi PLC equipment with dedicated drivers since the early 1990s. However, these interfaces (Serial and TCP/IP on Ethernet) largely concentrated on the Mitsubishi Melsec-A series PLCs. While Melsec-A is still used in a huge number of installations, Mitsubishi over the years has extended its product range with extremely powerful and cost-effective new models. The increasing worldwide popularity of these models has prompted the IGSS driver development dept. to write dedicated IGSS SCADA drivers to the Mitsubishi Melsec-Q and Melsec-FX series PLCs.

Since the driver communicates directly with the PLC using the CPU programming port, there is no need for extra communication ports. Using a small e.g. FX1S-14MR with 5 digital Inputs and 8 digital Outputs and an IGSS FREE50 puts you in business with a very small automation project for less than EURO 250!

The Mitsubishi Melsec-Q series PLCs are a bit more powerful and flexible than the FX series. The IGSS Melsec-Q driver (Driver ID: 79) offers a serial (RS232) interface to the Melsec-Q series PLCs either using a communication board on the Mitsubishi PLC (e.g. the two port QJ71C24N-R2 board) or connected directly to the CPU programming port (using a standard programming cable). The PLC driver supports all popular device types including: Data Registers, Link Registers, File Registers, Timers, Counters, Inputs, Outputs and a variety of different relay types. The driver supports the Mitsubishi FORMAT5 framing format which makes it compatible with all CPU types in the Melsec-Q family of PLCs (e.g. Q00J, Q00, Q01, Q02(H), Q06, Q12H, Q25, Q12PH, Q25PH, Q2A, Q2A-S1, Q2AS, Q2AS-S1, Q2ASH, Q2ASH–S1, Q3A, Q4A, Q4AR).

While both Mitsubishi interfaces uses one or more serial ports (RS232), they are both pretty fast and they easily poll up to 10 register blocks per second.